>>5870042====
It took only five seconds for the Sith to devise orders. She boomed at the transponder:
“Amass the air cavalry on my left! Drive everything before you and pin the first cruiser! Do not let those X-fighters drop bombs on our starboard! We’re going to fly straight for Mlle. Rosenberg herself!”
The baron cried back through the hologram:
[If only Moeller was here, Commander! ]
“You can deal with it, Périgord! Trust in me!”
[Your Grace! - I always have! ]
Lady Bocchi was thrilled. She put away the transponder. “These cruisers are being commanded by the young Je’daii general Rosenberg! She’s made a stupid mistake, and I intend to punish her severely for it!”
The Sith huffed arrogantly. “You don’t attack an Imperial division when a Sith is around. I do not lose!”
The plan was simple. Smash the lead cruiser and force the second to reinforce - that meant engaging with a boarding party of their own and fighting the imperials on their terms. Baron Alekhine de Périgord’s squadron would keep the last cruiser and the enemy fighters busy.
It was time. A stormtrooper captain at the head of the other column screamed the order.
“Brace!”
Then, the collision.
The collision was brutal. The shock ripped the vessel like an earthquake. In the gallery, many stormtroopers, despite bracing into anxious balls, were still flung into the air and thrown around unceremoniously as the Servitude rammed into the Rosenberg cruiser.
You yourself are disoriented. Your helmet banged forward when the collision occurred. But there was not a single second to be wasted - you got up.
Everyone pulled themselves together. Sith Bocchi leapt up. You see her in front of you. Her smile was savage. She seized your arm and strode to the mouth of the gallery. A line of stormtroopers began to form by her, readying their blasters. The captain of the line ordered the battalion to switch from automatic fire to volley.
Volley fire pierced armour and sliced through flesh easily. It constituted a single powerful Tibana shot that drained a rifle’s magazine of energy instantly. Volley firing provided only one shot. But in such confines as aboard ships, matters were better settled anyway by hand and sword.
“Charge!”
Nearby engineers worked frantically with the burnt panels to open the steel door.
“Prepare!”
The gallery door shuddered violently.
“Arms!”
Then, it slid open.
“FIRE!”
The report of a hundred blasters depositing their deadly bolts of plasma into the air at once produced a terrific thunderclap that hammered one’s ears and gripped the soul. Forward was white - impossible to discern whether the volley found its mark as bolts filled the opening of the doorway and sailed into the enemy ship’s gallery. Frost blew in from the jagged seams of two trenchant hulls: as if a storm had swallowed the room, twenty thousand feet in the air.
